I was unable to put anything together for this week’s post due to time constraints, but I did put up five new images in the STL gallery. I do have four quick points on the week’s news below, though. Be back with a full post next week:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene must be expelled from Congress. This is so painfully obvious I cannot believe I have to advocate for this. There is right and wrong here, people. Stop making excuses for the fascist supporters of these wicked people. We have to draw a line.
If you have some extra funds to lose, download the Robinhood app and invest in GameStop, Blackberry, or another short-squeezed stock to try and stick it to the oligarchs on Wall Street. Just remember, those stocks will come crashing down to their “real” value sometime soon. So make sure not to be left holding the bag, or don’t use any resources you can’t afford to lose.
This is getting very old: the Right must stop equating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to Black Lives Matter protests. One was an attempt to overturn a democratic election (though bourgeois) while the other is resistance against people being murdered in the streets and in their beds by agents of repression. No comparison.
Facebook is using the excuse that they should be able to take down leftist groups and pages just because they’re trying to get rid of right-wing extremists and Q-anon believers. This goes to the above point in that we are not the same. We are not just differing sides of a “conversation.” There IS right and wrong here.
On Jan. 11th,the New York Times and the AP reported that Trump’s State Department lead by his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo designated Cuba as a U.S. deemed state sponsor of terror. The label was applied to the nation from 1959 to 2015; the time between the Socialist Revolution of the Castro Brothers, Che Guevara, and the countless members of the People’s Socialist Party, and the détente under Barack Obama. In 2015, Pres. Obama took Cuba off the list and renewed diplomatic relations with the Socialist experiment that is Cuba, and Joe Biden is expected to thaw relations even further.
The Socialist Caribbean island-state is designated by Pompeo as a terror-supporting state for three reasons:
Cuba has taken in several members of the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) and defied extradition requests from the leaders’ home country. Peace talks between the ELN and the Colombian government took place in Havana beginning in December 2015 and lead to the ELN leaders never leaving. The Colombian government wants them to pay for an ELN bombing of a police station in Bogota that took place in 2019. Cuba refuses to send them back because it would violate protocols established between the two groups during peace efforts that were broken off after the bombing.
Cuba is the protective home of Joanne D. Chesimard, a.k.a. Assata Shakur. Shakur is a former member of the Black Liberation Army and is still wanted for a killing of a New Jersey state trooper in the 1970’s. Two other fugitives now call Cuba home along with Shakur, and they have never been extradited back to the U.S. for over some 50 years now.
Cuba is a strong ally of Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro; the U.S.’s biggest Latin-American boogey man right now (probably the biggest since Fidel Castro.) Despite crippling sanctions on this oil-rich nation of South America, the U.S. government, and most of the media, blame socialist reforms implemented during the time of Pres. Hugo Chavez as the source of every Venezuelan ill. It’s never the sanctions, always the radical left ideology.
The State Department says Cuba has, “…provided support for acts of international terror.” Therefore they join only three other countries on the list: Iran, Syria, and North Korea. (Cuba’s a little out of place, don’t ya think?)
According to a Reuters report, Cuba has already got a cash-strapped economy that shrank 11% in 2020 due to the pandemic, tougher U.S. sanctions, and domestic inefficiencies, according to Economy Minister Alejandro Gil. And the NYT reports, Cuba has began having shortages of both medicine and food, as the article describes,
“…Cubans have been forced to stand in line for hours in the hope of getting their hands on the meager stocks that exist.”
If you go back into the past posts of STL. you will see my obvious sympathy for the nation of Cuba. There are terrible, terrible lies that are spread about Socialist Cuba all over regarding accusations of large executions, brutal forced labor camps, and any and everything Che Guevara related (If you can stomach it, check out this short YouTube clip of Joe Rogan stating on his popular podcast that Guevara was a “mass murderer.”) And most of these lies come from former rich Cubans who were not interested in showing any humanity towards the country’s poor after the Revolution. They all packed their bags, headed north for Florida, and they still cry for their exploitative businesses, like their sugarcane plantations where the peasants did all the work, living in ignorance and filth. This is why Trump won Florida in 2020. “Little Havanna” knew that both Trump’s and Pompeo’s massive egos cannot handle this little island shaking it’s fist at the monolithic United States.
My point, finally, is that it is ridiculous for Cuba to be designated as state sponsor of terror. And second, these sanctions only hurt the people there. The long lines, lack of food, and absence of electricity and cooking fuel in Cuba (and in Venezuela) are a result of sanctions. And now there are new one’s levied by our ruler on his last days in office.
Tell me, have sanctions worked in North Korea, Iran, Iraq under Saddam, Venezuela, or Cuba? No, they have not. They have just hurt the people.
And on a lighter note, check out this comedy sketch about Cuba’s designation as a terror-supporter at the State Dept. from Breakthrough News:
It’s Friday, so that means five more propaganda images over at Google Photos. Use them as you see fit in order to spark the achievement of a new and better world. See ya next week!
A far-left system is the best form of government for the working class to live under. So what we need to do is smash the current, so-called Democratic system we have now that is controlled by the 1%. What to replace it with?
Put a transition
government in power: A group or party to move us through the steps of building
a new, just society. We must support responsible leaders to take us through the
ideological battle with those who will want to keep the old capitalist system
in place, namely, the rich and powerful.
But during
this time, we may sacrifice some of our freedoms for a short amount of time
during the conflict between the rich the workers. Freedom of the press, free
speech, freedom to demonstrate maybe stopped for a certain amount of time
because we need to crackdown on these current so-called rights because they are
controlled by the rich and their dominant ideas which wish to maintain the
current, corrupt system. For example, freedom to demonstrate, like a general
strike, which means everyone in every occupation goes on strike, will be fought
against by the rich by replacing striking workers with scabs, i.e., people who
will take the striking workers’ jobs. And believe me, demonstrations will be
met with violence from the authorities.
Yet, we must
watch the transition leadership very closely.
The USSR
tried this idea out, with calling the transition government the “vanguard
party” and it led to history’s greatest monster, Josef Stalin, coming into
power. Stalin came to power under the force of the newly suppressed rights and
became a dictator who committed such crimes that are too many to list here.
So, take
this warning seriously. The government of and for the people can be high-jacked
if we do not make leaders accountable.
What the
people of the working class need to do is smash the current corrupt system controlled
by the rich and powerful and replace it with responsible leaders who can lead
us through the war of ideas, and probably against violent suppression. And this
will mean a crackdown on some of our most cherished freedoms, but they will be
returned in time once the rich and powerful have their control over us destroyed.
Yet we must keep our eyes on this transition party because a rising leader or
group could use the loss of these freedoms to create a dictatorship.
As I have
stated in the subtitle and the About section of this website, Sparking The Left
comes from a radical leftist point of view. And I do not use the term “radical”
as a negative designation but as a realistic description of our current situation
for the current system needs radical change.
The forms that make up a radical or far left system of government here at STL are socialism, communism, anarchism, and all their subsets.
Do not close
this tab after reading that!
I know what people think of when hearing of far-left systems: Stalin, gulags, purges, mass starvation. But those are the result of authoritarianism rather than of a radical leftist government. A true form of socialism, much less communism or anarchism, has not been practiced in history. And what a true form of a radical leftist system is about is putting power in the hands of the workers.
Workers should own the companies they work for because they are the ones who are doing the labor. Right now, major stock holders on Wall Street own and control our factories and corporations but do nothing but sit and collect profits while we get crumbs. They don’t unload trucks, sort freight, work a cash register, fill orders, or what-have-you, for often at more than 40 hours a week. The fruits of our labor have been torn away from the rightful owners; that is us, the workers.
If a far-left system were to be won, the new government would take power over, or socialize, the factories and corporations in the name of the people. And when the time is reached, they will be democratized for and by the workers. But I know what you are thinking right now. You’re saying, “How can a corrupt system like ours ever turn over the power to the workers?” The answer is we smash the current approach; the so-called democratic system. It must go.
Now which form of a far-left government we construct in its place is up for debate, and, in all honesty, I’m not sure which exactly one should be. But what I do know is right now socialism is the best form of government possible. In general, I believe the best practice for creating our new society is that we must take the best ideas from socialism, communism, anarchism, and, yes, our current capitalist-state to create a new, truly democratic government. And we must leave behind the Gulags, purges, and mass starvation.
In conclusion, the view of this blog comes from the radical leftist point of view. I take the best ideas of the four forms of government outlined above to build a fairer system for the working class. And although it sounds extreme, our current so-called democratic system must be smashed.
Over the past few months, I have been publishing a podcast on working class issues. Yet I returned to Sparking The Left because the number of listens were very low. But in some episodes I began with editorials trying to convey the radical-leftist approach. So I’ll be posting a few of the essays here, in easy to understand language, to outline STL’s far-left point of view:
As I have stated above, this blog now comes from a radical leftist point of view. And I know what people think of when hearing of far-left governments:
Stalin
Gulags
Purges
Mass starvation
But those are results of authoritarianism rather than a radical-leftist government (another post for another time).
A true form of socialism, much less communism, has yet to be practiced in history. And what a true form of a radical leftist system is about is putting power in the hands of the workers. Workers should own the companies they work for because they are the ones who are engaged in the labor.
Right now major stock holders on Wall Street own and control the factories and corporations. But they do nothing but sit and collect the profits while we get the crumbs. They don’t unload trucks, sort freight, work a cash register, fill orders, or what-have-you, for often more tha
n 40 hours a week. The fruits of our labor have been usurped from the rightful owners; and that is us, the working class.
Now, I hear you saying, “How can a corrupt system like ours ever turn over all of the power to the workers?”
The answer is we smash the current capitalist oligarchy; or our so-called democratic system.
It must go.
Now which form of a far-left government we construct is up for debate. And in all honesty, I’m not sure which one it should actually be. But what I do believe right now is socialism is the best form of government we have available to us at this time.
So, in general, we must leave behind the Gulags, purges, and mass starvation, and enact a socialist government. Though it sounds extreme to complete this feat, but our current so-called democratic system must be smashed.
Any ideas or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Sparking The Left 